


Carrie-Anne

by LSDAndKizuki



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Ghosts, Mental Health Issues, Prison, Suicide, afterlife musings, heavy OITNB influence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 15:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9663545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LSDAndKizuki/pseuds/LSDAndKizuki
Summary: Death says to you, you have options. You can live on in Heaven. You can live on in Hell. You can live on as a spirit. You can lie in oblivion. Who would choose the last one?Carrie-Anne certainly didn’t, because she told me all of this.The tale of a bored woman in maximum security, and her conversations with the ghost of another bored woman.





	

**Author's Note:**

> An original ghost story inspired by Orange Is The New Black. Hope you like it!

No matter which way you slice it, death is a boring experience, because anything interminable is boring, and death is certainly interminable. The best thing about it is that it gives you a few options. The saddest thing about it is that almost no one chooses the best option, the least boring one.

Death says to you, you have options. You can live on in Heaven. You can live on in Hell. You can live on as a spirit. You can lie in oblivion. Who would choose the last one?

Carrie-Anne certainly didn’t, because she told me all of this.

She told it to me from the top bunk. I could not see her, but I heard her, and I sensed weight above me pushing the springs of the bed down. _You’d think,_ she added, _that reincarnation would be an option too, but it isn’t. You only live once._

“Who _does_ choose oblivion?” I whispered, because it was the dead of night when Carrie-Anne decided to start this conversation, and lights would not come up for another three hours. Margot snored in the cell next to mine. The bunk above me was not being used, except by Carrie-Anne, but no one had bothered to dismantle it. Some time ago, there had been need to divide the cells one between two, but then the new block was completed, and everyone got a room of their own. The springs groaned. _I don’t know, do I?_ She said, almost angrily, if that was possible. _I haven’t_ met _anyone. Some suicides, I guess. People who want to get away from it all. But most people choose Heaven, because… Well, it’s Heaven._

“I’d probably choose Heaven,” I mused. “That’s where my family are.”

_Probably. But don’t bet on it. Hell is surprisingly popular._

“How d’you know _that?_ ”

_I’m just repeating what I was told. I don’t actually know if it’s true for everyone. Maybe we all get different choices depending on who we were in life. I mean, who really knows?_

I smiled sleepily. “Certainly no one alive.”

A ghostly laugh, the kind you might imagine being swallowed by the silence of outer space. _Well, sorry to bear bad news, but death doesn’t clear much up._ The weight disappeared, not with any visible movement, but with a fuzzing of the edges, a blur of reality, making it seem as though it had never been there at all.

 

“You know Carrie-Anne talks to me?”

Margot’s fingers peeled the yoghurt lid away from its pot, and her tongue lapped up the residue from its underside. She did not respond to my comment. Julie Jefferson said in a piercingly loud voice “What kind of shit you trynna start?”

I stabbed at my meal with a plastic fork. It bent uselessly against the baked potato’s tough skin. It was a meagre potato, one that barely deserved the dignity of being cut, but what else was there to do? “Nothing. I’m telling you the truth.”

“Oh, Julie,” said Matilda McDonald, “let the poor girl deal in her own way. You say you saw Carrie-Anne,” she addressed me, “then you believe that if you want to.” I attacked my potato with the plastic knife and fork in tandem, and managed to form a crack in it. I inserted the knife into the slit and wiggled it from side to side, exerting virtually no force downwards.

“Pass a butter pack, would ya Margot? You got like five over there.” Margot still said nothing, but her black eyes swallowed mine up as she took one of her packs between her stocky fingers and pressed it onto my tray. “Thanks. You believe me, don’t you?”

Margot said nothing, but she did not deny it. “You’re damn messed up.” That came from Pepper, who had needle-thin cornrows. “Man, she ain’t yo’ girl. You’re damn messed up, saying shit like this.”

I shrugged, then ate quietly, and allowed the talk to move on to other matters, like the cleanliness of the bathroom, and the possibility of some new and better mattresses coming in, and where Julie was hiding the drugs, and everything else they talk about in prison, wringing out each little lifestyle detail like the last drops from a rag. Like me, Margot stayed silent, and though I kept my eyes glued to my potato and beans, I felt her eyes on me all the way through dinner.

We heard the klaxons, and the woman with the bullhorn, “back to cells, everybody. Back to cells, everybody.” And there our conversation was terminated.

It was a good thing that Carrie-Anne was talking to me. I wasn’t sure how I would have stood the boredom without her. “I wanna see you,” I said aloud. “Could you come out?”

She walked into my cell. She had brown freckles over her darker brown skin, which looked bright and alive when she smiled, but on an unsmiling and dead face, taut and diseased. _You’re looking well_.

“Better than you, I hope. I got a question.”

 _Shoot._ She was smiling a little knowing smile – because she knew, didn’t she? That if she was willing to continue talking to me, she had to be willing to endure every question under the sun, all the ones far beyond _what’s it like_ and _why did you do it._

“I was wondering why you chose this. If you had other options and you knew that one of them was oblivion, why did you choose to be this?”

It was of course a personal question, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by the hurt on her face when I asked her, but I couldn’t help feeling that if she was dead, then we, the living had a few rights to her privacy. _I don’t deserve Heaven_ she said, in her enveloping voice, silent in the air but clear between my ears, _and I was too scared to pick Hell._

It still didn’t add up. “You were gonna be stuck here for life,” I said, frustrated. “What was the point of offing yourself if you were just gonna stick around after death?”

_You think I want to be here?_

“I can’t think of anyone who’d want to be here.”

 _I won’t ever escape from here,_ was all she said, a small sad voice ringing from the ether in my brain, _death is boredom._

Boredom of course makes you do some crazy shit. It was already the prevailing sensation in all my activities, after only a month in maximum security. Now, after a nameless amount of time which I had long since given up tracking, it had all but driven me to the brink. You had yourself, and whatever they gave you, and if you were me, you had Carrie-Anne.

Carrie-Anne had hit the brink a long time ago, and it showed from time to time.

“Hey,” Pepper hissed to me from the cell to my right at roll call. “Don’t go fuckin’ round with Margot.”

“Why would I be fucking with Margot?”

“Don’t play dumb, bitch! You keep on mentionin’ this stupid ghost bullshit when she’s right there, don’t think I don’t see what’s happening.”

“What?” What _was_ happening? The little fantasy in Pepper’s warped mind might lift the heavy curtain of _nothing of any interest whatever_ that weighed so on my shoulders. “I ain’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”

“O you sly bitch. O you sly little cunt. And she ain’t even yo _girl –!”_

“You don’t make no sense, Pepper,” I cut in languidly, “You know that? You say the same shit over and over again, and it makes no sense to the rest of us, tell me, does it make sense to you?”

But the CO was coming down, big-titted and big-voiced, yelling names and glaring at us like bad children, so there our conversation was terminated.

 

Carrie-Anne floated like madness into my meditation session, and there she wreaked havoc upon my resting brain cells, as if to berate me for daring to relax in this trap. I pushed my knees close to my chest on my mattress, and tried harder to empty my brain of everything, but it just gave her more room to shuffle around like a roach in a sink, like a rat in a sewer.

She cried real tears into my optic nerves, forcing salt water out of my eyes that was not my own.

She made a feast of my calm, leaving me only the breadcrumbs and an image of her in the position I found her, naked and bulging-eyed, blood staining a helpful windy path from her wrists to the shining pool in the toilet bowl. The weapon, a plastic fork snapped crudely and sharply in half, lay sticky in the red mess. Nowadays they checked our pockets before we left the dining room for our cells. Her stiff body was not smiling at the time, but in my head now, she did, a wicked _gotcha_! smile.

“Carrie-Anne haunts me,” I wept to Margot in one of the cubicles on a calmer evening, when even the COs were too tired to bother with a thorough round-up. “It ain’t fair. I didn’t do nothing to her.” Margot stroked my hair and planted kisses on my wet cheeks, as if to say she was sorry, for landing me in this spot. “She haunts me,” sobbed Carrie-Anne into Margot’s smooth pink neck, “please, help me, ma’am.” And Margot whispered to her that she would do everything she could.

 

I was sitting near the edge of the outdoor enclosure. Our small building was rooted and concrete, and the grass out here was only just green, but every second out here was a true blessing. The clouds rolled in layers up above me; how many layers were there? When did you run out of clouds? Could you count them, try to explore them? I pushed a palm into the cold dirt. It yielded wetly underneath. A rain had fallen. “You can walk through walls,” I yelled to her, even though I could not see her, because she came to me in many ways that were not sight. “Come on, girl, I seen you do it. Just _go!_ Leave!”

Not for my sake. If Carrie-Anne hadn’t been here, I would have gone mad a long time ago. But her sadness, her desire for freedom burned so hard, and it added onto mine. It hurt, and I wanted one of us out. It couldn’t be me, because I could not walk through walls.

_I can.  I know I can._

“So do it! It’s just a fence!” There was just so much stasis. The world was turning, moving all the time, except for this one desolate fenced square.

_… No. I…_

“Don’t you wanna?”

_Yeah. I wanna._

I could have torn my hair out for the frustration of it. “Goddammit, Carrie-Anne, why the fuck won’t you _go?_ ”

The poor girl couldn’t answer me. I’d learned nothing, not since the moment I’d seen her corpse sprawled with an arm poking out from under the door. I’d never know the truth. “You coulda picked oblivion,” I said, and my face crumpled viciously, against my will.

Can a ghost shift her weight? She seemed to, and when she did she shifted the very air. Some movement, at last. _Well,_ she said, clearly uncomfortable, _even oblivion gets boring after a while._

_What’s the worst thing, you ask me? The boredom. That’s what stings, no doubt about it. You get so bored that you forget what boredom used to be to you, before you made a mistake and ended up with nothing but it, a lifetime supply. So what do bored people do? If they can’t escape? They make up stories, or they go mad, or they die. One of three things: ghosthood, eternal afterlife, or sweet oblivion._

I watched Margot lean against the cubicle wall. She reached a hand behind the toilet seat, feeling for a cavity, from which she pulled out a cigarette, which she held out to me. I blew an imaginary light onto it, in my head saw the flames wink upwards before shrinking to cling to the roll of paper. Margot put the impotent drug in her mouth and pretended to take a long drag. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m here for you, if you want to talk.” I rubbed where my scars were, not aware of it until I saw her eyes tracking my fingernails. “Pepper doesn’t own me,” she said. “I love you. And you can tell me anything you want to, you know that.”

“I know. She haunts me, Margot. I can’t escape. _She_ can’t escape.”

And in the third cubicle of bathroom F, where the little brown stains of suicide blood would never quite disappear, Margot looked at Carrie-Anne scratching her bandaged wrists and undone hair, and nodded in agreement. There was nothing that could be done, so she stroked her hair with ridged fingers and raw palms, as they waited for the black bedtime call.


End file.
